


A Curious J(o)ellyfish

by StevetheIcecube



Category: Splatoon
Genre: Cultural Differences, Gen, Secret Santa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-22
Updated: 2018-12-22
Packaged: 2019-09-24 21:40:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17108597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StevetheIcecube/pseuds/StevetheIcecube
Summary: When Elliot found a strange-looking Inkling passed out at the end of his street, he knew he had to do something about it. He had no idea of the chain of events that helping him would start.





	A Curious J(o)ellyfish

**Author's Note:**

> This is my gift for the 24/7 Nintendo Music Stream Secret Santa (if you haven't come here from that community you should totally check the stream out, a lot of hard work goes into it) - my gift is for long-time member and leading Splatoon nerd euan707, whose info for his gift request was "I spend basically 90% of my time pretending to be a squid".

Okay, Elliot would admit that he'd never expected this. Inkopolis was full of all kinds of weird and wacky things, things Elliot could barely process, let alone understand, but this was the strangest thing yet.

The Inkling in front of him not only had really bad hair (the curls were so loose and lazy and the hair was barely styled at all), but he also only had eight limbs. Oof.

That said, his outfit was pretty fresh. Elliot hadn't seen anything like it before, sure, but that just made it all the more fresh, just in an indie sort of way. If you could call that much tight leather indie, anyway. Maybe it was something else, but he wasn’t quite up enough on non-high street fashion to work out all the names. He’d given up when someone had been arguing about the difference of counter-modernism and post-counter-pre-modernism with him.

Either way, there was an Inkling with a seriously strange fashion sense (actually, maybe the missing limbs were just body modification gone really weird?) just lying passed out at the end of the road. It was way too far out of the centre to be someone who’d just gone a bit wild on a night out, and yet, here he was.

Looking at the Inkling and grimacing, Elliot tucked an arm under his stomach and tried to roll him over, hoping that at some point he’d wake up or at least be in a slightly safer position. As he did that, the Inkling shifted, made a strange noise somewhere close to a shriek, and started clinging to him. Okay, that was sort of weird, but he could deal with that. Alternative Inklings could be weird sometimes, but once he’d had some time to recuperate he’d probably be perfectly fine and just go back to his life.

At least he wasn’t too heavy, but Elliot could practically feel his limbs losing their form as he attempted to walk down the road and back to where he lived so this weird experience could be over as quickly as possible. He’d kind of been hoping that he’d be able to go back to bed after he’d bought groceries, but apparently not. Because a weird Inkling was going to be using his bed.

When he got back, he laid the guy down in his bed, leaving him above the blankets just in case he needed to move and putting a bucket by the side of the bed. Just in case. Who knew what this guy had been up to that led him to this situation, after all. Could have reached a seventh layer of weird.

He went to get his shopping, and when he came back, the weird Inkling must have been up, because he had located the blankets in the corner of Elliot’s room and had piled them on top of himself, and was now curled in a ball. Served him right for passing out in the road, presumably overnight, in nothing more than a skimpy leather top and shorts. What was he expecting would happen? He’d wake up warm and toasty at home?

Ah well, if he was sleeping then there was probably no point in waking up. He probably needed the rest, and Elliot should probably take that chance to get off his arse and start actually working before midday rather than lazing around in bed all the time.

-

As he fast discovered, the Inkling he’d picked up off the ground earlier in the day was not a normal Inkling or even just a weird one. He really was a piece of work, and that was the only way Elliot could think of to describe him. He must have been some country kid who got caught up in the wrong crowd immediately after coming to Inkopolis, because he really didn’t speak properly.

He seemed to understand what was going on just fine, which was something, Elliot supposed, but his accent was awful and his way of speaking was just so not fresh. It was practically ancient, honestly. He’d only encountered words like groovy in period texts he studied at school that read like a foreign language, practically.

His name was Joe, and he was very, very reluctant to talk about anything. Which was just fine with Elliot, because he couldn’t understand a word of what Joe was saying half the time. Which made it, overall, pretty hard to piece together how Joe had ended up here. There was something about a train. And then fighting? And maybe a cucumber, or maybe Joe had the wrong word because there was definitely something about a blender, so it was just as likely that he’d been trying to say some kind of fruit and it hadn’t quite translated.

Elliot had given him some food, he’d eaten it, and then he’d gone back to bed. Poor guy must have been exhausted. And quite possibly suffering from memory loss, given how disjointed his story was. The bits he’d managed to grasp really didn’t make any sense.

Despite the strangeness of it all, though, he did quite like Joe. He was quiet and strange, but not in a creepy way. More in an endearing way, honestly. Joe didn’t understand what was going on or what had happened, but he had been cheerful and tired and kinda cute.

-

It didn’t take Elliot to work out what was really going on. Sure, everyone pretended it wasn’t a thing, but there were Octolings in Inkopolis now. Which made the whole thing with Joe make a lot more sense. Why he didn’t understand, why he didn’t have anywhere else to go. He was an Octoling, and hey, Elliot wasn’t going to mention it to him or anything, but it totally wasn’t a big deal.

After all this time (okay, a week), of Joe living in his house, Elliot had come to really enjoy his presence. He liked not being alone in the house, having someone else to feed so he remembered to feed himself. He even liked talking to him about all the things Joe didn’t understand because he was a ‘country squid’. Elliot had practically formulated the poor kid’s cover story for him.

Joe was sweet, and kind, and had a very strong aversion to beans. He liked poetry, for some unknown reason that Elliot really could not fathom (why would anyone like poetry? It was just a song without the fun bit), and somehow, though Elliot really didn’t know how an Octoling had learnt this, he knew how to play accordion.

Elliot had honestly forgotten that someone had even left an accordion in his house. These kinds of things happened, after all. His life was full of bizarre, wacky coincidences and things that slotted together when they really shouldn’t. But he’d walked in from going out for the day to run errands to find Joe sitting on his sofa playing an accordion. And he was damn good at it. For some reason.

So he decided to move it further because Joe needed to get out of the house more. He signed the pair of them up for an open event, expecting it to be a disaster in which they got laughed off stage because his voice sounded approximately equivalent to Judd’s wailing layered on top of itself six times, played backwards, and bass boosted. But then that didn’t happen.

That didn’t happen, and they were invited as a supporting act to someone else’s ‘indie concert’. Elliot was fast realising that he was becoming exactly what he, well, he didn’t despise alternative culture. But he didn’t really get it either. Maybe that was how he’d stumbled into it by accident. 

And then they did another one, and another. And in the fourth one, the main act dropped out and they ended up playing way more songs than they’d practised thoroughly. And it was...okay, they weren’t making much money from it, but it was fun as hell and Joe was really coming out of his shell through his weird talent.

-

It didn’t take long (well, it took a while, but it felt like a short time when everything was rushing past and not dragging like Elliot’s life before this had) until people started really paying attention to them and they got invited to do larger and larger gigs.

It reached a point where Elliot ended up quitting a lot of his other commitments to make time for the music stuff. He didn’t know why he was compelled to do that, because music was such a tough industry to break into and it wasn’t even like it was the thing he’d been aiming at all his life. But somehow, when he saw Joe’s face whenever Elliot had to turn a booking down...he couldn’t refuse.

Joe, despite being a lot better than he had been, still didn’t really have anyone else other than Elliot. He was shy, and his Inkling language was pretty shaky at times, and his understanding of culture was still abysmal. Music was the thing they had together and the thing that Joe really loved.

So, after a time, they ended up...actually getting a job out of the music thing. Their bookings were frequent enough that people recognised them in the street and they started getting scouted for branding deals and adverts (this did result in discovering that Joe had absolutely no on-camera presence but it surprisingly didn’t hold them back).

And okay, the job was small. Just some slowly rising player who wanted a couple of medium names and faces to go on his amateur league. But there was something about the offer...the warmth of the people present, the enthusiasm of their words, the potential, the excitement. The acceptance of difference and the wholehearted embrace of people of different talents, different skills.

It was a small job, but Elliot didn’t even have to ask Joe if he wanted to take up the offer. He already knew the answer was yes, and the journey that began with a strange Inkling passed out on his street continued.

**Author's Note:**

> Ngl the Secret Santa was probably rigged specifically so Euan could roast my gift. Merry Christmas, Euan, and a fresh new year!
> 
> Thank you all for reading :) a comment is appreciated if you liked it. I haven't written stuff for Splatoon in a while (uhhh prob should finish that one at some point) so I hope I didn't sound too out of practise.


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